While I do commend your unexpectedly good grip on history I do have one comment to your argument of people needing a primer: People can be subverted by gradually changing the conditions (as you have pointed out). It's not entirely impossible that such a gradual change might be the extension of what we're currently experiencing - if laws like the PATRIOT Act were the start of a trend and further down the road, when people have accepted the current set of laws, there would be further similar laws it might be possible to slowly subvert society with the people not noticing that all their freedoms have been made obsolete until it's too late.
I'm not implying that it is happening, but it's certainly possible. Especially when the current enemy du jour is an abstract concept like terrorism.
First, bad guys will arm themselves like it not. Making arms illegal hampers their ability to arm, but they will always find their ways. Honest citizens who do not break the law on the other hand, and so when firearms are made illegal it leaves the criminals armed and the honest citizens unarmed. This is hardly an ideal state of affairs.
Note that by making it hard to get weapons (for example by requiring people to first undergo training and pass a mental check and only allowing specially certified stores to sell weapons) you get a safer environment than by handing out shotguns in the supermarket. Yes, criminals will arm themselves, but it's a lot easier for them to arm themselves when they can buy a shotgun at the supermarket than when they can only get their guns via illegal import (making them much easier prey for the police).
Besides, I don't quite trust John Sixpack to actually handle a gun responsibly. Not without a psychological certificate.
Guerilla warfare. It's for that exact situation: Your enemy has superior firepower, but he can't distinguish between you and random civilians, so sooner or later he will start sending out death squads, which will drive more people towards you, making life even harder for him. Things like keeping the enemy troops under constant attack and boobytrapping dead enemy soldiers work to your advantage, as well. Sooner or later the enemy soldiers desert or develop stress disorders.
It is possible to defeat an army with only a handful of people. It's extremely messy but possible.
Do you think that the German soldiers in WW2 were corruptible bums? Or the East German NVA soldiers? All it takes to corrupt an army is someone who gives the wrong orders. Afterwards the soldiers will tell you that "we only followed orders".
The fact that the soldiers swore to protect the Constitution is not worth shit when their superiors tell them to forget about the Constitution and shoot those rioters. A few will desert, they will be shot and the others will rather suppress a riot than get executed.
What shocks me is that Americans seem to think there are only two parties. In Germany we used to have a four-party system with two major and two minor parties and since the last election we even have five parties in the Federal Diet. None of the two big parties ever get a majority on their own; they are always forced to form a coalition with someone else or have a minority government. This does work to balance the major parties' positions a bit.
I tried Ubuntu Warty, but didn't quite like it. Since apart from Cedega (which happens to be the only app that has problems with my graphics card) everything works quite well I guess I'm going to stick with Gentoo for the time being.
gksudo might be worth a try. Later. There's no ebuild and I'm too lazy to make one. Also I don't know whether it automatically replaces/extends kdesu and as I'm a KDE monkey I never run into the Gnome su dialog anyway... (Kubuntu probably has something for KDE, but I'm too lazy to build an ebuild for that, too). Most serious stuff is command-line anyway.
I am a Gentoo user, but I switched to Gentoo after experiencing every single binary package based distribution I tried horribly die whenever I tried to upgrade to the latest release. Most distros require the use of third-party packages because the official repositories miss certain apps (at least for home desktop use), but trying to upgrade with third-party (RPM|DEB)s in place tends to destroy the installation. I don't care about my apps being 0.0005% faster (they probably aren't because I did no work to optimize anything), but I do like not having to deal with destructive upgrades. Also, Portage is really great.
The one thing Gentoo should copy off Ubuntu would be support for sudo everywhere (optional, of course) - perhaps with a sudo USE-flag for KDE/whatever Gnome uses.
Oh, come on. You filed the bug in 2002! They still have to test it for a few years to make sure it's stable, then they will try and solve it. You can't expect Debian to fix any cutting-edge bug...
Concerning the tabs: I use session saving extensions. Some tabs stick around for weeks before I actually read them. I keep the number of persistent tabs below ten, however, as I don't like clutter.
Concerning the homepage: I thought about grabbing all comics, archiving them and showing me the ones I haven't already seen. However, I didn't want to have to write regexps to extract the images from forty pages. Also, that way I'd miss on the authors' rants, which sometimes are better than the comic itself.
What I currently have is a CSS-based popup menu containing all relevant newsfeeds (about ten or so), organized links to my favourite sites and a dynamic list of webcomics that update today (along with a list of comics by weekday). It works well, although I'm playing with the thought of grabbing the feeds on demand using AJAX - the RSS stuff makes the page quite slow, at least until the latest news have been cached. OTOH, using a daemon to prefetch the stuff might be an even better idea.
The fact that my start page is a local PHP script that tracks the status of about forty pages really helps keep my tab count low. It also earns me geek points, especially because at least thirty of them are webcomics.
I notice that Flock uses a lot of the shared memory, when I do "top" I get 4 "flock-bin" items, each using 16.6% of my 256 MB of RAM. So Firefox/Flock is a big problem, I'm just glad I'm using it on a livecd linux.
No, they're each using 4.15%. top lists threads as separate process and every thread gets the usage information for the whole program.
Firefox used to eat memory in the past, but since version 1.5 it's been quite well-behaving. I usually have between eight and twenty tabs open and the memory usage is hardly even near 100 MiB.
Microsoft would increase the cost of every product by five percent (that is the limit by european law, which europe could charge as a fine) and print on the box that this increase in the cost is due to an unfair tax by European Commision on Microsoft. No need to pull out or anything.
Raising the cost from "way overpriced" to "way overpriced". Windows is already seen as extrmely expensive. Besides, it's been years since I've seen a copy of Windows that wasn't pirated or OEM.
By definition, source code is the most correct and complete documentation and is the only such documentation.
Have you ever heard about the IOCCC? The fact that there is source code using an API does not mean that it fully explains the use of said API. Also, everyone using the sourcecode would have to license it from Microsoft, effectively keeping Open Source completely out of the picture. Of course we could ask Microsoft to put the source code of every new Windows release into the public domain, but for sime reason I think that might not be better for Microsoft.
With correctness and completeness comes the complications. If you want to define a year precisely then you have to define a leap year (4th year) and then a non-leap leap year (100th year) and then a non-non-leap non-leap leap year (400th year) and so on. Even after all those things you need a dead second every between years every now and then.
Yeah, "we can't be bothered to write a documentation, because it's too complicated. If people want to use our APIs they can figue them out by trial and error" is really what's interoperability is all about. Besides, you don't really assume that Microsoft have no kidn of internal documentation whatsoever, do you?
Who decides what is an adequate documentation?
The EC's trustee, which happens to be a software business. If they find that the provided information is in fact usable and does not contradict the way Microsoft programs communicate (as was found to be the fact with Microsoft's latest offering) it's adequate.
EU wants that the documentation could be used as spoon feed to competitors so that they can compete with Microsoft. I agree that competitors should be able to compete with Microsoft but on their own merit not on Microsoft's merit. Why Microsoft is asked to understand all that source code (many coders who has written that code are probably left microsoft). It should be competitors who should do that.
Microsoft is using undocumented API behavior to make adequate competition impossible. Other companies can not compete on their own merit because they are severely handicapped. Besides, if it's really like you imply and Microsoft has no internal documentation whatsoever they also gain something from this punishment: They can actually continue using their own APIs without having to guess how they work.
Competitors could probably argue that if these other divisions in Microsoft can't understand something then they could call somebody and learn about it. Well, Microsoft is also offering this service to others. Microsoft is giving five hundred hours of free tutorial in understanding this documentation. Five hundred hours of tutorial is like a minor diploma. If a smart coder can't learn in five hundred hours then probably that's not a smart coder to start with. Plus one can also purchase more hours for money to cover-up their dumbness.
Hey, that's great. I'm going to call Microsoft right now and tell them that I need the unpublished documentation for their APIs for my Open Source project. They will surely help me. The 500 hours are available to private customers and come without any conditions, right?
EU is unfair. If Microsoft's product are taxed five percent in the name of fine, then probably US people and on their behalf US government could come in rescue.
Copyright is also an asset. Remember, we're talking about deliberately pissing off a multinational government representing an entire continent. If pissed off enough the EU could easily (pass a law allowing them to) seize some or all of a corporation's rights to certain products as reimbursement for outstanding debts. Just imagine what happens when suddenly Windows XP is not protected by copyright in the EU anymore... Microsoft might be a 300 pound gorilla, but in comparison the EU is a 70 ton battle tank.
If you read this one you knew that the EC is contracting an independent company to evaluate the documentation. This company is communicating with other companies which would profit from fully documented internal APIs. Which means that exactly the peple who are later going to use the documentation decide whether it is adequate or not. If you still tink that this is pling stupid I'd really like to see how you would evaluate the documentation.
The really small businesses will not have a problem. They just replace their two laptops and are done with it. The bigger small and medium sized businesses will hire consultants to help them switch - or they just keep using Windows and slowly transition to something else. It's not like using Windows suddenly became illegal.
"I always was a Windows user. But then suddenly Microsoft said that they won't sell Windows in the EU anymore. I was shocked, like, how'd I run all the new games? But then Apple made this special offer where European customers got 20% off and all the game companies announced that they'd release their stuff for the Mac and then I just thought: 'Why not?'
After I got that Mac my gaming life definitively got better. I mean, it's so easy to use and you don't have to reinstall every half year. I also don't have to lug this huge box around to LAN parties. The iMac is like, just the monitor.
My name is Jay Random and I'm a gamer."
I think mostly might be excessive not everyone runs XP Pro corporate edition (Slashdot is not a representative sample).
1.) Joe Sixpack's Windows breaks down, as privately used Windowses are wont to do
2.) J. Random Techie gets called in to fix the computer up. As the damn thing was sold without a Windows CD and for some reason the repair partition won't boot (and is space-inefficient anyway), Techie whips out his burned Win XP/SP2 Pro Corporate CD, reinstalls the system using a serial of which Microsoft never knew it existed and thus saves the day.
3.) Joe Sixpack continues using his Windows, not caring that it's pirated. Maybe he's slightly annoyed for five minutes that Microsoft did not provide a CD. Well, thanks to Techie he now has one.
Microsoft uses an internal API that is not openly documented. That's uncompetitive, which happens to be illegal when you're as big as Microsoft. What is the EU going to do in oeder to get Microsoft to comply? Issue a $100M fine? How cute. The only thing that might ever get Microsoft to cave in is constant pressure, which is what the EU are applying. And it's not like Microsoft provided a full documentation and then the EU said "we're not going to take it, give us more". An independent company checked the documentation and decided that it's nowhere near adequate.
If you don't think that a corporation should be fined more than once ever you can write to your MP.
...now is a good time to write to our elected representatives, asking for a further push for FOSS. After all, when even the prospect of a multimillion dollar fine per day is not enough for Microsoft to provide these informations why should we trust them to run our governments' IT infrastructure? If Microsoft is not willing to deal with us on our terms we should make sure that in the future we don't have to deal with them as much as we do now.
If someone here has some experience with writing to MPs I'd appreciate some tips on how to write something that doesn't make you look like a rambling madman.
Hm. You are probably right by assuming that it's a joke. Then again people have been hosting corporate images privately for the sake of archiving some of the more hilarious suff and some corps would do ANYTHING for attention. Microsoft released a rather ridiculous penguin photoshop (which essentially portrayed Linux' versatility) as an ad campaign against Linux (see http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~hal/misc/msad.jpg). I do trust business to come up with such such a brain-dead ad campaign. They have before and they will again.
Slashdot Mirror
While I do commend your unexpectedly good grip on history I do have one comment to your argument of people needing a primer: People can be subverted by gradually changing the conditions (as you have pointed out). It's not entirely impossible that such a gradual change might be the extension of what we're currently experiencing - if laws like the PATRIOT Act were the start of a trend and further down the road, when people have accepted the current set of laws, there would be further similar laws it might be possible to slowly subvert society with the people not noticing that all their freedoms have been made obsolete until it's too late.
I'm not implying that it is happening, but it's certainly possible. Especially when the current enemy du jour is an abstract concept like terrorism.
Or to members of the former East German army, who were ordered to kill people tryig to flee across the border into West Germany and did so.
First, bad guys will arm themselves like it not. Making arms illegal hampers their ability to arm, but they will always find their ways. Honest citizens who do not break the law on the other hand, and so when firearms are made illegal it leaves the criminals armed and the honest citizens unarmed. This is hardly an ideal state of affairs.
Note that by making it hard to get weapons (for example by requiring people to first undergo training and pass a mental check and only allowing specially certified stores to sell weapons) you get a safer environment than by handing out shotguns in the supermarket. Yes, criminals will arm themselves, but it's a lot easier for them to arm themselves when they can buy a shotgun at the supermarket than when they can only get their guns via illegal import (making them much easier prey for the police).
Besides, I don't quite trust John Sixpack to actually handle a gun responsibly. Not without a psychological certificate.
Guerilla warfare. It's for that exact situation: Your enemy has superior firepower, but he can't distinguish between you and random civilians, so sooner or later he will start sending out death squads, which will drive more people towards you, making life even harder for him. Things like keeping the enemy troops under constant attack and boobytrapping dead enemy soldiers work to your advantage, as well. Sooner or later the enemy soldiers desert or develop stress disorders.
It is possible to defeat an army with only a handful of people. It's extremely messy but possible.
Do you think that the German soldiers in WW2 were corruptible bums? Or the East German NVA soldiers? All it takes to corrupt an army is someone who gives the wrong orders. Afterwards the soldiers will tell you that "we only followed orders".
The fact that the soldiers swore to protect the Constitution is not worth shit when their superiors tell them to forget about the Constitution and shoot those rioters. A few will desert, they will be shot and the others will rather suppress a riot than get executed.
What shocks me is that Americans seem to think there are only two parties. In Germany we used to have a four-party system with two major and two minor parties and since the last election we even have five parties in the Federal Diet. None of the two big parties ever get a majority on their own; they are always forced to form a coalition with someone else or have a minority government. This does work to balance the major parties' positions a bit.
Interesting... I think I will try out Ubuntu again, but when I actually get around to it Dapper will probably be out of fashion. ;)
I tried Ubuntu Warty, but didn't quite like it. Since apart from Cedega (which happens to be the only app that has problems with my graphics card) everything works quite well I guess I'm going to stick with Gentoo for the time being.
gksudo might be worth a try. Later. There's no ebuild and I'm too lazy to make one. Also I don't know whether it automatically replaces/extends kdesu and as I'm a KDE monkey I never run into the Gnome su dialog anyway... (Kubuntu probably has something for KDE, but I'm too lazy to build an ebuild for that, too). Most serious stuff is command-line anyway.
I am a Gentoo user, but I switched to Gentoo after experiencing every single binary package based distribution I tried horribly die whenever I tried to upgrade to the latest release. Most distros require the use of third-party packages because the official repositories miss certain apps (at least for home desktop use), but trying to upgrade with third-party (RPM|DEB)s in place tends to destroy the installation. I don't care about my apps being 0.0005% faster (they probably aren't because I did no work to optimize anything), but I do like not having to deal with destructive upgrades. Also, Portage is really great.
The one thing Gentoo should copy off Ubuntu would be support for sudo everywhere (optional, of course) - perhaps with a sudo USE-flag for KDE/whatever Gnome uses.
Oh, come on. You filed the bug in 2002! They still have to test it for a few years to make sure it's stable, then they will try and solve it. You can't expect Debian to fix any cutting-edge bug...
Concerning the tabs: I use session saving extensions. Some tabs stick around for weeks before I actually read them. I keep the number of persistent tabs below ten, however, as I don't like clutter.
Concerning the homepage: I thought about grabbing all comics, archiving them and showing me the ones I haven't already seen. However, I didn't want to have to write regexps to extract the images from forty pages. Also, that way I'd miss on the authors' rants, which sometimes are better than the comic itself.
What I currently have is a CSS-based popup menu containing all relevant newsfeeds (about ten or so), organized links to my favourite sites and a dynamic list of webcomics that update today (along with a list of comics by weekday). It works well, although I'm playing with the thought of grabbing the feeds on demand using AJAX - the RSS stuff makes the page quite slow, at least until the latest news have been cached. OTOH, using a daemon to prefetch the stuff might be an even better idea.
The fact that my start page is a local PHP script that tracks the status of about forty pages really helps keep my tab count low. It also earns me geek points, especially because at least thirty of them are webcomics.
I notice that Flock uses a lot of the shared memory, when I do "top" I get 4 "flock-bin" items, each using 16.6% of my 256 MB of RAM. So Firefox/Flock is a big problem, I'm just glad I'm using it on a livecd linux.
No, they're each using 4.15%. top lists threads as separate process and every thread gets the usage information for the whole program.
Firefox used to eat memory in the past, but since version 1.5 it's been quite well-behaving. I usually have between eight and twenty tabs open and the memory usage is hardly even near 100 MiB.
Whoa, I'd never have thought about that one.
Microsoft would increase the cost of every product by five percent (that is the limit by european law, which europe could charge as a fine) and print on the box that this increase in the cost is due to an unfair tax by European Commision on Microsoft. No need to pull out or anything.
Raising the cost from "way overpriced" to "way overpriced". Windows is already seen as extrmely expensive. Besides, it's been years since I've seen a copy of Windows that wasn't pirated or OEM.
By definition, source code is the most correct and complete documentation and is the only such documentation.
Have you ever heard about the IOCCC? The fact that there is source code using an API does not mean that it fully explains the use of said API. Also, everyone using the sourcecode would have to license it from Microsoft, effectively keeping Open Source completely out of the picture. Of course we could ask Microsoft to put the source code of every new Windows release into the public domain, but for sime reason I think that might not be better for Microsoft.
With correctness and completeness comes the complications. If you want to define a year precisely then you have to define a leap year (4th year) and then a non-leap leap year (100th year) and then a non-non-leap non-leap leap year (400th year) and so on. Even after all those things you need a dead second every between years every now and then.
Yeah, "we can't be bothered to write a documentation, because it's too complicated. If people want to use our APIs they can figue them out by trial and error" is really what's interoperability is all about. Besides, you don't really assume that Microsoft have no kidn of internal documentation whatsoever, do you?
Who decides what is an adequate documentation?
The EC's trustee, which happens to be a software business. If they find that the provided information is in fact usable and does not contradict the way Microsoft programs communicate (as was found to be the fact with Microsoft's latest offering) it's adequate.
EU wants that the documentation could be used as spoon feed to competitors so that they can compete with Microsoft. I agree that competitors should be able to compete with Microsoft but on their own merit not on Microsoft's merit. Why Microsoft is asked to understand all that source code (many coders who has written that code are probably left microsoft). It should be competitors who should do that.
Microsoft is using undocumented API behavior to make adequate competition impossible. Other companies can not compete on their own merit because they are severely handicapped. Besides, if it's really like you imply and Microsoft has no internal documentation whatsoever they also gain something from this punishment: They can actually continue using their own APIs without having to guess how they work.
Competitors could probably argue that if these other divisions in Microsoft can't understand something then they could call somebody and learn about it. Well, Microsoft is also offering this service to others. Microsoft is giving five hundred hours of free tutorial in understanding this documentation. Five hundred hours of tutorial is like a minor diploma. If a smart coder can't learn in five hundred hours then probably that's not a smart coder to start with. Plus one can also purchase more hours for money to cover-up their dumbness.
Hey, that's great. I'm going to call Microsoft right now and tell them that I need the unpublished documentation for their APIs for my Open Source project. They will surely help me. The 500 hours are available to private customers and come without any conditions, right?
EU is unfair. If Microsoft's product are taxed five percent in the name of fine, then probably US people and on their behalf US government could come in rescue.
What? Are you going to send the International R
You expect someone here to actually know anything about the topic he flames about? You must be new here...
Copyright is also an asset. Remember, we're talking about deliberately pissing off a multinational government representing an entire continent. If pissed off enough the EU could easily (pass a law allowing them to) seize some or all of a corporation's rights to certain products as reimbursement for outstanding debts. Just imagine what happens when suddenly Windows XP is not protected by copyright in the EU anymore... Microsoft might be a 300 pound gorilla, but in comparison the EU is a 70 ton battle tank.
If you read this one you knew that the EC is contracting an independent company to evaluate the documentation. This company is communicating with other companies which would profit from fully documented internal APIs. Which means that exactly the peple who are later going to use the documentation decide whether it is adequate or not. If you still tink that this is pling stupid I'd really like to see how you would evaluate the documentation.
The really small businesses will not have a problem. They just replace their two laptops and are done with it. The bigger small and medium sized businesses will hire consultants to help them switch - or they just keep using Windows and slowly transition to something else. It's not like using Windows suddenly became illegal.
"I always was a Windows user. But then suddenly Microsoft said that they won't sell Windows in the EU anymore. I was shocked, like, how'd I run all the new games? But then Apple made this special offer where European customers got 20% off and all the game companies announced that they'd release their stuff for the Mac and then I just thought: 'Why not?' After I got that Mac my gaming life definitively got better. I mean, it's so easy to use and you don't have to reinstall every half year. I also don't have to lug this huge box around to LAN parties. The iMac is like, just the monitor. My name is Jay Random and I'm a gamer."
I think mostly might be excessive not everyone runs XP Pro corporate edition (Slashdot is not a representative sample).
1.) Joe Sixpack's Windows breaks down, as privately used Windowses are wont to do
2.) J. Random Techie gets called in to fix the computer up. As the damn thing was sold without a Windows CD and for some reason the repair partition won't boot (and is space-inefficient anyway), Techie whips out his burned Win XP/SP2 Pro Corporate CD, reinstalls the system using a serial of which Microsoft never knew it existed and thus saves the day.
3.) Joe Sixpack continues using his Windows, not caring that it's pirated. Maybe he's slightly annoyed for five minutes that Microsoft did not provide a CD. Well, thanks to Techie he now has one.
Microsoft uses an internal API that is not openly documented. That's uncompetitive, which happens to be illegal when you're as big as Microsoft. What is the EU going to do in oeder to get Microsoft to comply? Issue a $100M fine? How cute. The only thing that might ever get Microsoft to cave in is constant pressure, which is what the EU are applying. And it's not like Microsoft provided a full documentation and then the EU said "we're not going to take it, give us more". An independent company checked the documentation and decided that it's nowhere near adequate.
If you don't think that a corporation should be fined more than once ever you can write to your MP.
...now is a good time to write to our elected representatives, asking for a further push for FOSS. After all, when even the prospect of a multimillion dollar fine per day is not enough for Microsoft to provide these informations why should we trust them to run our governments' IT infrastructure? If Microsoft is not willing to deal with us on our terms we should make sure that in the future we don't have to deal with them as much as we do now.
If someone here has some experience with writing to MPs I'd appreciate some tips on how to write something that doesn't make you look like a rambling madman.
Hm. You are probably right by assuming that it's a joke. Then again people have been hosting corporate images privately for the sake of archiving some of the more hilarious suff and some corps would do ANYTHING for attention. Microsoft released a rather ridiculous penguin photoshop (which essentially portrayed Linux' versatility) as an ad campaign against Linux (see http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~hal/misc/msad.jpg). I do trust business to come up with such such a brain-dead ad campaign. They have before and they will again.